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Body work 10: fixing cut corners

Another giant leap. All it took is the happy convergence of a few things namely: a rudimentary understanding of welding, the realization that ‘good enough’ is good enough, and, well if it comes out total crap I can just cut it all out and try again -it’s only my time after all. So what did I do with my new found intrepid spirit? I welded that headlight area back on that I cut off about 18 months ago. I didn’t have my camera through most of the hard part, but it looked a lot like the work I did in the rocker -rough, nasty and strong.

Near the finale. I tried the headlight rings on to see how it looks. It looks okay, but if I measure with a straight edge, the plane of the two headlight rings is not parallel one side to the other. The outer edge is about 1/4″ too far out.

That bondo-ey looking stuff is All metal, a metal impregnated filler.I ground the welds down, tapped any high spots with a hammer then skimmed along the seam.

I needed to build the valley between the hood edge and the fender up about 1/8″ – 1/4″ so I layed it on heavy to sand down later.

The car looks much happier and, well a little better than good enough. Yes, those are the repro turn signal lights I got from OK parts. Had to get a feel for the full effect so I loosely assembled all this stuff on.

This shows the two or three jobs left here. I need to close the line where the ring meets the body a little, I need to cut the headlight mounting features into the flat inner part of the headlight opening, and I need to do some major shaping/sanding between the grill opening, turn signal light and head light.

From the other side. It really does look a lot better! I may buy a new inner part for the headlight from a UK supplier if I can’t get it all to fit right.

Another little welding job was this area of rust in the nose. Hey those are my grubby shop shoes just visible through the hole. Notice the lacey rust holes in the piece I cut out.

And heres the new piece all welded into place. It was while doing this that I started getting some pretty decent welds.

I know what you are thinking -this all looks pretty amateur. I can accept that. Because this is not going to be a show car, it’s not even going to masquerade as a nice car at all. I’m going to fix the rest of it myself, do all the skimming and sanding then paint it -all by my self. Once that is done it’s going to get a minimum of trim, sporty springs, Koni shocks, a 1600 with hot cams and I’ll say it’s an abnormale.

I haven’t been keeping careful count, but it must be about 830 hours to go.